socratic

Hemlock Ring in progress.  I learned Emily Ocker's circular cast-on via this tutorial yesterday morning, and it's very neat!  The blanket's speeding along so far, thanks to a fresh crop of Miss Marple episodes on the DVR.  

Julia McKenzie is quite good, isn't she?  Not too namby-pamby.  The production values on the last two seasons of Miss Marple and Poirot on Mystery have been such an improvement -- striking camera angles, great sets, colors that pop.  Very visual in a way that the old ones simply weren't.

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I've been racing through books lately.  I just don't feel like myself when I don't make some time to read novels.  There's something valuable about reading fiction that helps me approach problems from different angles and consider other points of view.  Two highlights:

The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters
Post WWII, a country doctor befriends the Ayres family at Hundreds Hall.  Landed gentry, the Ayres are struggling to keep up a crumbling old pile, and the financial and emotional strains, as well as their increasing isolation from the social circle in which they once flew, are getting to them.  Waters reinvents the Gothic novel, pitting logic and science against emotion.  The real thing to watch here is the narrator, though.  Unlike Waters' other novels, the plot is very linear, building slowly.

Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese
Born from an illicit union between a nun and a brilliant but emotionally stunted surgeon, twins Marion and Shiva Stone grow up in a cross-cultural household in Ethiopia, raised by doctors at Missing Hospital.  This compelling story about family, love, and betrayal is set in a tumultuous time in African history, and the setting really shapes the book.  It may sound a little melodramatic, but it's a great read.